


Arbor

by Siria



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Challenge: artword, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-31
Updated: 2008-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-03 20:38:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The trees told her first. Ronon took point, and John and Rodney trailed after him, bickering absentmindedly about something inconsequential, but Teyla paused and listened, looking from the ruins around them to the distant tree line and back again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arbor

**Author's Note:**

> We took as our inspiration the [July 18, 2008](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080718.html) picture of Jupiter rising over Ephesus. Many thanks to Jenn for fic beta duty, and to Trin for encouragement.

[ ](http://discolore.oxoniensis.org/artword15_siri/siria_art01.png)   
_ Art by Aesc. Click for full-size image. _

The trees told her first. Ronon took point, and John and Rodney trailed after him, bickering absentmindedly about something inconsequential, but Teyla paused and listened, looking from the ruins around them to the distant tree line and back again. The sky overhead was cloudless, the clear air carrying nothing more than far-off bird calls, the nearer sounds of her team's voices. To the ear, this planet was peaceful in the absence of either humans or Wraith, an absence that had lasted long enough to have tumbled roofs from houses and weathered the cladding from their stones; to the eye, nothing seemed amiss either, and Teyla knew that if Rodney had picked up anything unusual on his life signs detector, he would have long since have let them know. And yet— She turned in a slow circle, looking from horizon to horizon and back again.

Teyla had grown up on Athos of the Trees, a name bestowed on the planet by a people reliant as much on the fruits of the forest as they were on the lakes and their small flocks for their survival. Teyla had grown up knowing which mosses could best be picked to use as wound dressings; which berries to eat and which to avoid; what it felt like to stand alone in the middle of a clearing and feel the slow-sap pulse of the woods around her—had grown up knowing how easily the forest would go on without her presence. Neglect a particular hunting ground for a season or so, and you would be to certain to return to find it in need of clearing—to cut back scrub at the very least, if not to uproot small saplings of the tenacious _mellthon_ tree, a plant which could send its roots out into open glades in search of light and space and water with astonishing quickness.

The vegetation on this planet was not so very different from that back on Athos; here, after many hundreds of years with no regular habitation—no people to stake out their claim to the land, no domesticated animals to crop at the grass, no machines to scrape down through the earth—the forest should have at least begun to reclaim the land under Teyla's feet. Yet beneath the soles of her boots, the street's paving stones still marched in a smooth, interlocking progression; not one dark-grey stone had been pushed out of place by an expanding root system. On the far side of the town's walls, grass swiftly gave way to flourishing trees, but within its boundaries, it felt as if all possibilities for growth were restricted, held back by something more than the uncompromising nature of stone. The hairs on the nape of Teyla's neck began to prickle.

Making sure that she had a firm grip on her P90, she jogged the few paces it took to reunite her with the others. John looked up—it seemed he and Rodney were engaged in yet another iteration of their argument as to whether the production of a fully functional light saber was feasible—and cocked an eyebrow at her. "You okay?"

"I am not certain," Teyla admitted, puffing out a breath. "I have not seen anything, but there is something about this place that makes me feel uneasy—it gives me wraith-touch."

"Wraith?" If Rodney didn't quite yelp, then the noise he made wasn't far from it; one hand went for the gun in his thigh holster, while the thumb of the other scrolled frantically through the screens on his life signs detector. "I'm not picking up—"

John kicked Rodney lightly on the ankle. "You know those Pegasus cultural induction classes were mandatory, right?"

"What?" Rodney glared at him, dignity only partially impaired by the fact that he was hopping on one foot. "I have _no_ idea what—"

"Wraith-touch, not touch _by_ a Wraith, Rodney. It's a, what do you call it, a—" John waved a hand at Teyla. She suppressed a sigh; after five years of friendship, it could no longer be surprising to be called on to do John Sheppard's explaining for him.

"It is a common idiom on many of the worlds in this galaxy, Rodney," she said. "I believe it's the equivalent of what you call 'goose bumps.'"

"Oh." Rodney blinked rapidly for a moment. "Well, that's rather nonsensical, isn't it? I mean, the potential for confusion alone is—"

"Whereas comparing your fear to the flesh of dead poultry makes much more sense?" Teyla said mildly. There were times when it was best to cut Rodney off before he got into full flow.

"Yes, well, regardless," Rodney said, waggling the detector at her, and proving that there were at least some occasions when he knew that discretion was the better part of valour. "I'm not picking up anything there. The only life signs I can see above the size of a common-or-garden rabbit are the four of us. No humans, no Wraith, no Ancients ascended or otherwise."

John called to Ronon, who had climbed onto the top of a nearby column drum and was surveying what he could see of the town: looking back up in the direction they'd come, towards the Stargate; along the sloping street they'd followed downwards through the settlement's heart; to the left and the right, and then down to what had once been its harbour, before the centuries' sediments had left the town miles from the coast. The MALP sent here pre-mission had transmitted back images of the two great piers that now jutted out into nothing more than a sea of blue-green grass. "Buddy, you got anything?"

Ronon shook his head and leapt back down in one easy movement. "Nothing. No recent movement. Just a lot of ruins. Looks like it's all residential buildings to the west. Might be something more industrial down near the old harbour. You interested, McKay?"

"Can you guarantee that there's nothing there that will want to rend the very flesh from my bones, hmm?"

"What?"

"_What_?" Rodney squinted up at him before waving a dismissive hand. "Teyla has a—thing, feeling, premonition. Whenever any of you three have, have _feelings_ about things, I invariably end up having to fend off certain death from a Tim Burton-esque vision of ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, and all I'm saying right now is that my expectations of this Tuesday involve neither flesh-rending nor any of my internal organs becoming external, okay?"

Ronon stared at him.

"Oh, shut up."

"If we could get back to the matter at hand," Teyla said, trying her best not to grit her teeth, or to think longingly of being back on Atlantis, where all she would have to cope with would be a toddler who was currently delighting in a new-found ability to simultaneously teethe and defecate. "I did not sense the presence of any Wraith, Rodney, nor did I see any sign of human habitation. But there is something unsettling about this place—I know of no planet which has been abandoned completely in the absence of the Wraith or some other natural catastrophe."

John cocked his head to one side and looked around them. "Yeah," he said slowly, "I'm not exactly seeing Death Star levels of destruction here."

Ronon made a low noise in the back of his throat, a hum of contemplation. "Roofs fell inwards, no masonry in the streets."

Teyla nodded. "And the trees—there is something unnatural about them."

"The trees?" John's eyebrows pulled together in confusion, and then flew upwards when Rodney began to nod his head in agreement with her.

"No, no," Rodney said, "I get what you're saying—the structural integrity of this place is way too good for somewhere that's been abandoned at least eight thousand years."

"It's still a little beyond a fixer-upper, McKay," John said, but Teyla was gratified to see that he was at last beginning to look around as if there was something worth seeing beyond the material.

"But it should be so much _worse_ than this," Rodney said. "Granted, I am about as far from a botanist as any sane person with a modicum of intelligence can be, but even I know that if you go a while without weeding? You get grass, weeds, creepers—go for long enough, tree roots will start to pull apart building foundations, ivy will make mortar crumble. This is a town which has been abandoned for longer than most nations on earth have been around—it shouldn't look so, so..."

"Tended," Teyla said.

"Someone's looking after it?" Ronon said.

John's eyes were unreadable behind his dark glasses, but he turned his head once more to look out at the expanse of the city tumbling away from them down the slope: the echoing, empty houses; the long lines of grey and white stone carved here and there in a still mimicry of now-absent leaves. "Don't think there's anyone here to take on a gardening project this size."

"Doesn't make sense," Ronon said.

"Not yet," Rodney said, already fiddling with one of the small computers he carried in his pack. "But give me a moment."

John and Ronon conferred; Rodney mumbled something about _hope it's not more radiation_, bent his head over his work and sought for answers to be parsed from a string of numbers, the co-ordinates to _why_ and _when_; Teyla watched the cloudless sky overhead, the impassive blue, and wondered what secret this place could hold, to make the slow, implacable sap of nature still and wait.

***

Rodney found no radiation, energy signatures, or elements of pollution in the air from industrial activity or combustion, or traces of the peculiar pheromones given off by a Wraith in the throes of the hunt. The only thing of any interest showed up on his very last scan: a small heat signature of indeterminate origin, coming from the direction of the docks, down where Ronon had suggested they should investigate.

John led them down the street, Teyla following a bare footstep behind him. There was no talk now, only the sound of their boots on the pavement, the sound of the four of them breathing as evenly as they could. Teyla half-expected an ambush, but none came—no hive ship dropped its heavy belly into the sky overhead; no pillar's shadow hid a sniper; no people appeared but those carved into the soft grey stone of the walls, their limbs unmoving and their eyes sightless. They made their way down to the old harbour, down streets lined with storage sheds and warehouses, without being harassed in any way, but by now, Teyla was sure that—

"Being watched," Ronon rumbled, voice pitched soft enough that only she and John could hear him.

"Yes," Teyla agreed, the word made sibilant on the exhale of her breath—though perhaps _watch_ was not the right term for it. She let her eyes close for a moment, more aware of it now. It wasn't the buzz and the chitter that filled her head whenever Wraith were nearby, the constant low hum of beings who sought the reassurance and the dominance of being intertwined with one another always; it was not Michael, the bitter and angular edges of his mind seeking admittance to her own; it was more a feeling of pressure at the very edge of her consciousness, something curious pushing at her, wondering who she was. Testing her.

Teyla opened her eyes. "In there." She pointed at one of the buildings standing opposite them—taller than most others, its white stone was unadorned with sculpture, and it had no openings save for one tall doorway. Nothing about it gave any clue to what lay inside, but the sight of it made the pulse beat faster in Teyla's throat, between the fine bones of her wrists. It was in there.

"I'll go first," Ronon said. Teyla heard the familiar whine of his blaster powering up while she rechecked the clip in her P90.

"Uh, guys?" Rodney asked, his voice pitching upwards precipitately.

"We're all going in, McKay," John said, patient as he could ever manage. "If you don't—"

"No, no," Rodney said, smacking him on the arm to get his attention. "It's not that far after noon local time, it shouldn't be... it's, it's getting dark very quickly?"

And Teyla looked up and noticed it too: how the sun seemed to be dropping below the horizon, as quickly as if a string suspending it in the sky had been suddenly cut; how the temperature was dropping fast enough that her fingers on her rifle seemed chilled; how the light around them was fading to dusk, and then to darkness. She felt something push past her, hard and impatient—heard a strangled yell from Rodney, John's grunt, Ronon's choked-off curse—and then Teyla was left there, in the dark, and alone.

***

For a moment or two, panic pulsed in Teyla's veins in time with the beat of her heart. She could see nothing, hear nothing but the harsh pant of her breathing, could think only that it was happening all over again: that she had lost half her family in one blow. It was an effort to master herself, to regain control over her emotions, but Teyla managed it: a steady breath in, another out; _a mirage_, she told herself firmly, _nothing more than a Wraith-truth_, shapes thrown by bodies moving in the light of an thin and obstructed flame.

It was still afternoon, she told herself firmly; she still had her gun, and her knives, and herself; her team could not be far away, and they would never leave her truly alone. Teyla tucked a stray lock of hair back behind her ear, and flicked on the P90's flashlight, using it to show her the way into the building.

It must have been bigger inside than it seemed from the exterior—the ceilings were high enough to swallow the sound of her footsteps, as well as the dim glow of her flashlight. Teyla could neither hear nor see anything beyond the slight halo cast by her P90: a sensory deprivation of the worst kind, when her every nerve was straining for some sign of those outside herself. In, and further in, until she thought she must be standing near to the very centre of the building—it was just as quiet here, just as empty, but Teyla knew that appearances could be deceptive when it came to the Wraith. Her instincts told her that her team was here; her instincts told her that she was being watched, thanks to that unwavering, curious pressure against her mind which seemed familiar, but which Teyla could not place.

She could not decide whether to press on ahead, or to turn back, or to strike out at an angle so that she could find the walls and use them to guide her—_press onwards_, Teyla thought, and then _wait_. It was only a mirage, after all: it was still afternoon on a world where the sky overhead was blue and lush greenery pressed close around the boundaries of the unimaginable; the building she had seen before darkness fell, could not possibly have been so big; if Teyla focused beyond the cold, she could feel the light at the tips of her fingers.

"No," she said out loud, and pushed back at that pressure, and opened her eyes—only to find herself back outside in the square alone, the warm press of the sun on the nape of her neck rendering her P90's flashlight useless. The men were still gone, but now that she had eyes which could see, Teyla could be certain of tracking them—there were scuff marks on the stone, scrabbling marks in the dirt. Whatever had taken them had indeed pulled them into the building, and this time when Teyla followed them in, the building was smaller, and brighter inside, and she could see what it must once have been.

Decayed pieces of Wraith technology rotted slowly amidst larger machines that looked vaguely Ancient in origin, though their sharp lines had been married with a technology that was not familiar to her. They must all have lain here so long that the smell of putrefaction had long since left the air, but Teyla found herself gritting her teeth against it all the same—there were stasis pods here, she saw, as she ventured further in, levels and levels of them tunnelling downwards into the earth; connected to long-dead power supplies, the people within them now nothing more than twisted skeletons—gritted her teeth against the knowledge that horrors had been inflicted here, long ago. No wonder the trees would not grow here; their roots would only ever want to seek a cleaner earth.

There was writing, too: on the walls and the floor and even up on the ceiling. Teyla thought it might have been in Ancient, but time had blurred the once crisp edges of the letters, had run ink into charcoal into smears of something that might have been blood. She could make out words, here and there—questions, mostly, _why_ and _why_ and _why_ inscribed over and over—but trying to make full sense of what was being written here made Teyla's head ache. There were answers there, she thought, but first she needed conclusions, first she needed her team standing strong by her side; so she checked the clip in her P90, secured it to the front of her vest, and made sure that her fine-bladed hunting knife could be pulled easily from its holster.

The steps beneath her feet were solid, betraying no sign of their age or of a lack of maintenance; Teyla went down into the darkness and tried to ignore the rows of pods which flanked the slowly spiralling staircase. Though quieter than a hive ship and lacking its uncomfortable warmth, she felt eerily as if she were on one of them—there was that same sense of being surrounded by suffering flesh, by the long, slow dying of others; of an uneasy kinship between Teyla's cells and the drive of a Wraith's heartbeat. Whatever was here was not Wraith, but it was like them, and it was close by, and Teyla knew without a shadow of doubt that it was _wrong_—and that it was below her, waiting.

_Focus_, she reminded herself sternly as she walked. Fear gained her nothing, even if it was of the unknown. Teyla had stood on precipices like this one many times before, and the dreaded drop had always ended with solid ground beneath her feet. One last breath, and she was at the bottom. Here, there should have been no light—she must have been several levels below the surface, deep enough that if she had been back on Atlantis, the waves would have been lapping far over Teyla's head—but the shadows here were made more distinct by a dull glow of amber-green, like light refracted off old copper, coming from the banks of stasis pods.

Teyla had not Rodney's facility with machinery, his way of parsing out connections at a glance, but she knew enough to know that these machines had been altered somehow; there was some quirk to her chromosomes, too, which knew at a glance that these pods had been constructed not to sustain life, but to _change_ it—and then Teyla rounded one row of pods and saw that three of the lit-up receptacles contained John and Ronon and Rodney. The pods' covers had not been pulled over them, but none of the three were awake. They were all partially covered in the webbing which the Wraith used to keep their victims numbed and barely conscious, but when Teyla rushed to pull it from them, she found that tiny roots had grown from the webbing into their flesh, holding fast and leaching the colour from the skin around them. John, in particular, looked far too pale; the scar on his neck was a worrying shade of blue.

"Come on," Teyla told them, "wake up, please, _please_." She tugged on John's hand, slapped Rodney's cheek, but not even Ronon—notoriously the lightest sleeper of any of them—would open his eyes. Teyla pulled her knife free of its holster and started to cut at the roots tunnelling into Ronon's cheek, feeling a surge of hope when the webbing came away easily. A muscle twitched along the smooth line of his jaw, and Teyla prayed that it was more than an unconscious reaction to the tiny fibres pulling free of his skin. She tugged and hacked at the rest of the webbing that lay over him, and had succeeded in getting perhaps half of him free before she felt that presence behind her.

Teyla whirled, knife at the ready in her hand, and saw it for the first time—saw _her_, Teyla realised. Not a Wraith, but rather a woman perhaps a little older than Teyla herself: her dark hair was matted and pulled back severely from her face, the hems of her trousers and long padded coat darkened where they had trailed in the dirt, and oh, her _hands_... Teyla repressed a wince at seeing them—the blood and the scarring, the worn places where once her fingernails must have been—and schooled her voice to a trader's winning gentleness, a mother's soothing ease.

"I do not mean you any harm," Teyla said, stretching out her free hand, palm up, to show that she offered no threat. The woman made no move towards Teyla, made no threatening gesture, but Teyla still kept her stance centred a little low, her weight resting on her back foot; even if harmless, this woman had somehow gained a facility with Wraith mental communication, and Teyla had long since learnt to be a careful guardian of the boundaries of herself. "But these are my friends—my family—and I must free them before these machines hurt them. Do you understand me?"

The woman blinked at her, but did not speak, and for a moment, Teyla thought that she was a casualty of the Wraith as so many others had been—the vitality of her mind sapped away with as much finality as others lost the strength in their limbs, her mastery of words vanished. "Do you understand me?" Teyla asked again.

No answer in words, but the woman held out her hands to Teyla, and it was sickening—the sight of them, and the rush of thwarted compassion that filled up the space between Teyla's ribs. Perhaps Jennifer could work some miracle, given time and patience; but there was the white gleam of bone here and there, and the scarring, and at the creases of the woman's palms, there were... Teyla's eyes widened. "What did they do to you?"

"Kin," the woman said, and her voice was like the scrape of stones at the bottom of a well, painful and echoing. She thrust her hands further forward, and the shape of them was unmistakable: feeding apparatuses. They were not cut into her palms, as Teyla had first thought, but rather organic, though they seemed almost unfinished, as if their growth had been stymied before the very end. This woman had been changed, and oh, the _pods_, the pods in which her team lay—

"What did they make of you?" Teyla asked, her voice given fresh urgency by horror. "What—"

"Kin," the woman said again, tilting her head so that she could look directly into Teyla's eyes—small as Teyla was, she still stood perhaps a hand's span taller than her—before pushing past Teyla and stretching up so that she could press her left hand to Rodney's chest.

"No!" Teyla said, seeing in that gesture all the anguish that had ever befallen her, all the grief that had lain like a stone on her chest because of partings come too soon—her father, and Aiden, and half her people, and the thoughts of losing her team, too, stilled her breath for a moment. She rushed to pull the woman back, strong enough to send her stumbling onto the floor. Teyla checked Rodney over quickly, but not only was there no extra grey in his hair, no new lines etched around his mouth, but there was no palm-shaped outline on his chest—not even the bleeding gash that resulted from a feeding interrupted before it had properly begun.

"What..." Teyla looked from Rodney to the woman, still sitting on the floor, and now cradling the hand she had tried to feed with to her chest. She was keening a little, liquid and high-pitched in the back of her throat, and for a moment Teyla thought she'd hurt her. Then she realised that the woman was not cradling her hand to her chest, but rather _pressing_ it there; that she was pulling the life from herself and restoring it in one near-instantaneous feedback loop that defied Teyla's understanding and her ability to imagine what level of pain it must involve. The woman's face flickered back and forth between youth and old age, her fine dark eyes sinking into flesh that sagged and wrinkled before restoring itself to what it must have been when she was barely older than Jinto was now, and Teyla didn't think she could bear to watch it any more.

"_Stop_," she snapped, crouching down to pull the woman's hand from her chest. "Do not—you must not—" Words had always been easy tools for Teyla; not a torrent, as they were for Rodney, but unfailing in their supply and ready for her to turn to good use. She could not think what she should say first: whether to admonish, or question, or console.

"Kin," the woman said to her again, looking at Teyla with a face so expressionless that it might have been carved, fresh and new, from smooth soapstone. "You are kin."

"I am Teyla, of Athos. I have come here with my friends, and if you let me free them from these pods, we can find a way to help you," Teyla said. She bit her lip; the chances of Woolsey letting her bring this unknown woman back to Atlantis were slim, for if she could press against Teyla's mind as she had, she was doubtlessly susceptible to contact from the Wraith. If, however, she and the others could ferry her safely to an alpha site, Teyla was certain that Jennifer and her team could be brought to work their everyday miracles on this woman; if she could not be brought back to who she had been, then some measure of comfort, of peace, was not something to be scorned.

Teyla folded the woman's hands to lie gently in her lap. "Stay here," she said, trying to hold the woman's gaze and hoping that she was being understood. "I shall let my friends go free, and then we shall bring you out of here."

The woman sat and stared at her, but made no protest. Teyla nodded at her, and offered the best smile she could before standing. She considered her options as she faced the three pods once more. She could cut them free, but it would take perhaps more time than she had, and who knew what the machines would do to her men by then? The power supply, Teyla decided—cut that off, and then decide what to do.

Wraith machinery tended to the individuals, with all the idiosyncrasies and individualities that came with their organic nature, but there was a certain level of standardisation to them all the same. To the front, Teyla knew, and slightly off centre... she stooped and plunged her hand into the front of the bank of pods and felt, amidst the faint, fleshy warmth, the cables that she was looking for. Count off the first, second and third, and then grasp and pull, she reminded herself. The power cords came free with little resistance, and Teyla sensed the light above her dim.

Raising her head, she saw with relief that whatever sustenance, whatever direction, the pod had been giving to the webbing was starting to fade away. Some of the roots were already detaching, and Teyla could see John's colour begin to improve, could see Ronon's chest start to expand and contract more deeply. If not entirely unharmed by what they had been through, she could at least be quite certain now that they would wake up.

Teyla reached to pull some of the webbing away from John, to help the process along, but heard a scraping noise from behind her—like feet being dragged against stone—before she could get very far. She turned to see the woman was standing now, a little unsteadily, and Teyla eyes widened at the thoughts of how much it must have hurt to haul herself upright on such hands.

"Has to go to the end," she mumbled, gesturing at the pods with one maimed finger. "Has to, has to, won't work if it..."

"It is all right," Teyla said, placating the woman while trying to keep one eye on her team. Ronon seemed already on the cusp of waking. "I know you must have been here some time, but we can bring you out of here, you don't have to stay—"

The woman shook her head vigourously, the first sign of true emotion that Teyla had seen from her, and it was unusual enough to pull all of Teyla's attention back to her. "Like you," she said. "Has to work. Makes us taste _better_."

Teyla had, since childhood, prided herself on her strong constitution, but the sudden realisation of what had happened here, the use this building had been put to, was like a blow to the solar plexus—weakening and overwhelming, enough to make choking bile rise in her throat, acid against the sandpaper rasp of her breath. "Make you—this is where they brought my ancestors, isn't it? The experiments happened here."

"Kin," the woman said, and raised her other hand, and Teyla took a step back when she realised she had been careless enough to allow the woman to take her knife from her, all unnoticed. "Like me."

And the horror of that was that it was true, Teyla thought: wherever this woman had come from originally, whatever the Wraith's botched experimentation had done to her long ago, she was no more than a quirk of DNA away from Teyla. This was what all the Athosians might have been, long ago; it was what Michael's threats had nearly made of them now.

The woman cocked her head to one side. "Not like me," she said. "All has to end."

"Please trust me," Teyla told her, holding up her hands, still wet from the innards of the Wraith machine, in a gesture of submission. "I am not lying, we can help you, find you a home—"

"Teyla?" Ronon, it seemed, had woken up, though he sounded weak and disoriented, his voice cracking on the syllables of her name. "Where—"

"Help the others," Teyla told him tersely; it was all she had time for before the woman lunged. She was clumsy and uncoordinated, but immensely strong, and Teyla's knife had been manufactured from the sharpest of Athosian ceramics. She aimed the knife for the hollow of Teyla's throat, the soft part exposed just above her tac vest, but Teyla feinted to the right and used the movement of her body to push the woman forward into the base of John's pod; the speed of it made the woman stumble and hit it head-first.

"_Teyla_," Ronon shouted, much louder this time, and from the corner of her eye, Teyla could see both him and Rodney start to struggle free.

The force of the impact would have taken anyone else a moment or two to recover from, but the woman was up and turning almost without hesitation, attacking again with the knife held low, and now she _screamed_. Her mouth was stretched wide, a gape of teeth and red, red tongue and Teyla saw that there was little left of her now but rage and hate and sinews held taut against pain: she had been hollowed out by the enzymes used to change her, as burnt and blackened on the inside as her poor hands were ravaged on the outside.

She struck again, and again, blows that Teyla managed to block with ease despite their strength. No matter how much Teyla pushed her back, no matter how many disabling blows Teyla inflicted on her in turn, the woman kept coming—perhaps, Teyla thought, panting and wiping the blood that flowed from a scratch on her cheek, she had forgotten how to stop. She would have to get the knife back, Teyla thought, it could not end without that—and then the woman stopped.

She pressed her hand once more to her chest, and set up that horrible keening again. Teyla knew what she was about to begin once more, what the woman's body was about to demand of her, and flinched. "End," the woman wailed, and Teyla knew it for a plea and a demand, both.

"Teyla!" This time it was John's voice, and Teyla let her gaze flicker to the left for a moment. John was sitting up now, watching with confusion and fear on his face; Ronon was standing on shaky legs, and Rodney's eyes were very large and blue in his face.

"_End_," the woman said again, and Teyla nodded.

She looked carefully at the woman beforehand—memorising those large dark eyes, the mouth that might once have known how to smile, the strong line of the cheekbones—because for this, Teyla knew, she would have to remember this woman's face always. "It ends," Teyla agreed, and unclipped her P90.

It took only one shot, because Teyla was careful and knew mercy's worth. She thought the woman might have closed her eyes in relief when Teyla pulled the trigger; at the end, her hands lay limp and lax on the floor beside her.

***

Rodney investigated, as Rodney always did. It took him a little time to successfully connect his computer with the building's systems—time John spent checking the remaining pods for any other prisoners while conferring with Woolsey and Lorne over the comm link; time Ronon and Teyla spent interring the body beneath a small, neat cairn of grey and white stones. Ronon seemed to understand, without Teyla saying a word, that the woman should not be placed in the soil, but surrounded rather by the buildings that would finally protect her as they should once have.

Rodney's mouth was a thin slash in his pale face by the time he emerged to stand with the rest of them in the open square. "It was—well, I have the data here." He gestured at the laptop computer that was strapped to his back. "It's not, uh, cheery reading, so I think I'll save it for when we're back home."

"Beer?" Ronon asked.

"Miko's vodka," Rodney said flatly as they set off back up the hill in the direction of the Stargate. Teyla was unsurprised; she would have said _ruus_ wine, at the very least. "I took the liberty, by the way, of jury-rigging the power system to form a massive feedback loop. The whole thing should blow in about fifteen minutes' time."

"Huh," John said mildly. "I chucked in couple pounds of C4, set it to go off in twenty. What do you suppose happens if you mix 'em?"

"Something _satisfying_," Rodney said.

None of the team had asked her what had happened, seemingly contented to wait until they were debriefed back on Atlantis, and to wait for her own tale when she had the words to speak it. But Rodney and Ronon and John stood three-strong around her while they walked, the noise of their boots on the paving stones a rhythm against which Teyla could pace her breathing; they spoke so that she did not have to, and her gratitude and her love for them was a counterpoint to the anger that lay heavily still against her breastbone.

They walked until they passed out of the city, until the stones under their feet gave way to growing grass and the air was full of the fresh, sharp scent of _beeska_ trees. Teyla breathed in deep, and looked up at the empty sky. When the sound of rending stone, the thunder of mortar and masonry collapsing back in themselves, echoed from behind them, none of them looked back.

"Satisfying?" John said, slipping his sunglasses back on.

"Very," Rodney said, as he dialled the gate.

Teyla blinked against the tears that stood suddenly in her eyes; but when her hands threatened to shake, to close themselves into tight fists, Ronon was there. He slipped one big hand into hers and squeezed just a little, un-scarred palm against un-scarred palm, a faint and welcome pressure that spoke of nothing more or less than affection, freely given. "When we get home," she promised him, and led them all back through the slipstream of the wormhole: back to where their city stood whole in the salt-clean air.


End file.
